At no time and in no instance has architecture been other than
an index of the flow of the thought of a people--an emanation
from the innermost life of the people LOUIS SULLIVAN

Architecture, in the largest sense, is the total of all
those spaces man has created for his own use. It
is also his greatest public art, and today his liveliest
as well. It is the one art form in which we are all
involved, if for no other reason than that we all
need and use it. Isolated from society, man will
almost immediately begin to recapitulate architec-
tural history, whether he seeks shelter in the cave,
stretches a tent, fells a tree, or even burrows into
the earth. But architecture is something beyond
the necessity for elementary shelter. Man also re-
quires an order of spaces which meet his inner
needs both as a complex psychological animal and
as a creature whose ultimate values are of the
spirit.

The great initial stimulus for the architecture
of our time has come, as it will continue to come,
from the revolutionary advances in our technology.
And yet the bewildering array of new forms is
perhaps less strange than they at first seem. The
multistory skyscraper and apartment house have
their prototype in the pueblo cliff house; the prin-
ciples of the tent are used in cable suspension
bridges and roofs and even in concrete shells;
Frank Lloyd Wright incorporated the basic earth-
hugging shelter and broad eaves in his early prairie
houses. What makes the new forms uniquely our
own are the materials--the alloys, metals, and syn-
thetics with which they are constructed--and the
novel way in which we use the spaces within our
structures.

Drawing on the structural inventiveness of the
engineer and the artistic imagination of the mod-
ern artist, the first radical formulation of a new
architecture had been made by the mid-1920s. It
was not the final one, although the image of flat-
topped cubes on stilts, illuminated by a vast ex-
panse of glass and austerely furnished with chromed
metal furniture captured the public imagination.
"Modern" is a concept in constant evolution, as
has been proved by the continuously developing
forms created by the three polarizing personalities
of this century, Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier,
and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.

At the same time that these principal form
givers were prodigal in new solutions, a vigorous
second generation came to power, at times chal-
lenging the founders, at times elaborating and
refining their insights. Today modern architecture
has become a universal phenomenon, achieving
unity by the acceptance of a common discipline.
But it is far from static. Already a new world of
shell structures is emerging to take its place along
with the forms already evolved, creating space en-
closures which may soon allow man to live in a
constant environment anywhere on earth, from the
equator to the arctic, perhaps even to sustain life
on the moon and in outer space.

Architecture has thus become the great adven-
ture of our time. To share its excitement there is
no substitute for the actual knowledge and experi-
ence of the forms themselves. Participation cannot
be passive. The approach to Le Corbusier's Chapel
at Ronchamp, on foot, up a winding mountain
path, is as much a part of the experience of the
church as the dark, cavelike interior that awaits
the visitor at the summit. The full mystery and
delight of Frank Lloyd Wright's buildings can be
known only by traversing the spaces themselves,
whether through the dramatic sequence of rooms,
within Taliesin or up the mighty spiral of the
Guggenheim Museum. The classical calm and pro-
bity of Mies van der Rohe's structures impose an
order that at the same time enhances nature by its
clearly stated division between what is man and
what is nature; but the full appreciation of Mies's
achievements requires our involvement with the
structures themselves.

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